‘‘Gooooddd mooorrrnnningg,’’ she good-naturedly booms.

‘‘It’s bright and early in the morning - I got up for you, babe.’’

The reason we’re chatting is the first Australian tour by the international pop star and her full band.

Renowned for a  voice which belies her diminutive stature, Anastacia boasts 30 million albums sold.

She has also attracted much notoriety for a catalogue of poor health related issues, including Crohn’s disease, and battled breast cancer twice — a more aggressive form in 2013 resulting in a double mastectomy.

Now touring in support of latest album Resurrection, the resilient singer gave us the lowdown.

Q: What can you tell us about your live show?

A: Well, in different tours and different shows I’ve done, depending on the venues you’re in and this kind of thing, you design your show accordingly. And being that this is called Resurrection, I really did feel that what I had gone through in the past five years – changing record companies, divorce, cancer – so many different, amazing things happened that weren’t necessarily something to be like, ‘yay’. 

I definitely had to go through a lot of changes, and this album projects the resurrection of the changes I’ve been through, kind of finding myself again. 

Q: That’s understandable. 

A: Finding a better me, a newer me, one with loads of excitement to want to tour, to want to get back in the mire of it being hard, but for some reason, I’m finding it extremely fun and easy, and that is really what Resurrection is. So the whole entire performance itself is labelled, kind of quoted in other articles as, ‘it’s all about the music’. This show, if you want to see just Anastacia singing, laughing, crying – not me crying, my fans are crying. But it just takes you through it, ‘cause I go old stuff, I go new stuff, and it all blends together. 

Q: Artists talk about how their real life is channelled into their art. What was the key message you wanted to project with the Resurrection album? 

A: Before I even wrote a word on the album, the name Resurrection was kind of looming over my head as a title. So I guess what I had already been through, and the diagnosis of my second cancer, sort of just understanding all of this, it was kind of an epiphany of, “wow, I think this album’s going to be the big one”. This is going to be the one; maybe not to other people, but to me. And that’s the way I feel. 

I do feel that what I have learned as a writer, from even doing my covers album that I decided to do to try to get in touch with the inner artist of myself. Many different things that I went through as an artist, I think I pulled all the best of it and tried to put it to good use, and write for my voice, instead of write with so many backgrounds around my voice. Really write like more of a rocker, and some of my songs if you notice don’t have a lot of huge backgrounds. They have great choruses, but it’s not, I could take a lot of wonderful knowledge from doing a Foo Fighters song, and doing an AC/DC song in my covers album, because it’s not about all the backgrounds that are singing with you. It’s about the killer voice that is actually penetrating the guitars. That’s what I did, and that’s what you’re going to hear a lot of during the Resurrection tour, is just some really great vocals that are fun for me to do, and fun to produce in front of people, ‘cause they still are like, ‘what?’ (laughs) 

Q: You mentioned the AC/DC cover - surely it must be mandatory to perform that one live in Australia?

A: Right, tell me about it. He is such an incredible singer; I don’t think people give rock music the homage and the respect that those voices actually... As screamy as some people think they are, god-darn, they can blow. You can actually understand the words when I sing it. I think that’s the only thing that people are like, ‘‘oh my God, I love that song, but I never knew what it said’’ (laughs). And I was like, well, me neither, and then I got the words and was like, ‘‘shit yeah, I can sing this song’’.

Anastacia 

Friday, May 1

WIN Entertainment Centre